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Book recommendation: Toxoplasma Gondii

12/06/2023
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Title: Toxoplasma Gondii: Prevalence and Role in Health and Disease.

Author: Erica dos Santos Martins Duarte.

Publication info: New York: Nova Medicine and Health. 2022. 

Location: Academic eBook Collection. 

Description: Toxoplasma gondii is a globally spread protozoan parasite responsible for causing toxoplasmosis. Infection by T. gondii shows high seroprevalence in humans, especially in South America. Written by specialists, this book brings important contributions and information on parasite biology, including its life cycle, ultrastructural features of tachyzoite, bradyzoite and their main specific organelles, mechanisms of host cell invasion, parasite replication and epigenetics regulation. Moreover, the book will encompass mechanisms of pathogenesis and host immune response to the infection, including purinergic signaling, and mechanisms of immune evasion by the parasite. Finally, this book also addresses relevant aspects of disease, information about the current chemotherapy of toxoplasmosis and perspectives for a future chronic disease treatment, epidemiology, and methods for visualization of the parasite by optical and electron microscopy.

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eBook Highlight: "What Patients Teach: The Everyday Ethics of Health Care"
04/18/2023
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Title: What Patients Teach: The Everyday Ethics of Health Care.

By: Larry R. Churchill; Joseph B. Fanning; David Schenck. Oxford University Press. 2013.

Available in our Academic eBook Collection. 

Description: "Being a patient is a unique interpersonal experience but it is also a universal human experience. The relationships formed when we are patients can also teach some of life's most important lessons, and these relationships provide a special window into ethics, especially the ethics of healthcare professionals. This book answers two basic questions: As patients see it, what things allow relationships with healthcare providers to become therapeutic? What can this teach us about healthcare ethics? This volume presents detailed descriptions and analyses of 50 interviews with 58 patients, representing a wide spectrum of illnesses and clinician specialties. The authors argue that the structure, rhythm, and horizon of routine patient care are ultimately grounded in patient vulnerability and clinician responsiveness. From the short interview segments, the longer vignettes and the full patient stories presented here emerge the neglected dimensions of healthcare and healthcare ethics. What becomes visible is an ethics of everyday interdependence, with mutual responsibilities that follow from this moral symbiosis. Both professional expressions of healthcare ethics and the field of bioethics need to be informed and reformed by this distinctive, more patient-centered, turn in how we understand both patient care as a whole and the ethics of care more specifically. The final chapters present revised codes of ethics for health professionals, as well as the implications for medical and health professions education." 

 

 

 

Pharmacy, Medicine, Health sciences, Healthcare administration, Nursing, Dentistry, Philosophy, Literature
Donald Van Slyke, founder of clinical chemistry
03/28/2023
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Happy birthday to Donald Van Slyke, the biochemist who founded clinical chemistry. In 1914, Donald Van Slyke became the chief chemist at Rockefeller Institute Hospital. Here, he measured the contents of patients' blood, including oxygen, carbon dioxide, acid, and electrolyte levels, in order to diagnose different diseases before more damaging or fatal symptoms appeared. This became the practice of quantitative blood chemistry, which has saved millions of lives. The term "clinical chemistry" encompasses measurements of blood and urine contents, and was popularized by the textbook Donald Van Slyke co-authored, Quantitative Clinical Chemistry. For his work on clinical chemistry, Donald Van Slyke won the first AMA Scientific Achievement Award. 

        

Left: Donald Van Slyke, PhD. Middle: Infographic on clinical chemistry tests, found in Access Medicine. Right: Clinical chemistry eBook available in Academic eBook Collection, one of our library databases. 

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Medicine, Health sciences, Chemistry
Mary Amdur's remarkable story of research ethics
02/17/2023
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Left: Mary Amdor. Middle: The deadly fog in Donora, Pennsylvania. Right: Woman walking through the fog in Donora. 

In late October of 1948, a combination of temperature fluctuations and deadly emissions from two U.S. Steel plants created a dense, yellow fog that hung over the city of Donora, Pennsylvania, killing 70 people and injuring 6,000 others. The fog, which contained sulfuric acid, nitrogen dioxide, fluorine, and other poisonous gases, remained in the city for several days until it rained on October 31st. Doctors and firefighters shared bottled oxygen with Donora residents and urged those with pre-existing lung and breathing issues to leave, but the density of the fog made driving and transportation nearly impossible.

Dr. Mary Amdur, a biochemist with a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, was recruited soon after to research the role that American Smelting and Refining Company (AS&R) emissions played in the casualties observed in Donora. AS&R wanted to prove that their emissions had a minimal effect on the deaths and injuries incurred, and they even requested that Dr. Amdur not study one of the gases released into the atmosphere. Dr. Amdur's research instead indicated that citizens of Donora were injured and killed as a direct result of the gases released: "She had demonstrated the irritancy potential of sulfur dioxide and its ability to interact with water-soluble metal salts to further oxidize the sulfur in the particle, which travels to the deep lung, where its potential for irritation would be magnified" (Mary O. Amdur, Oxford Academic). Dr. Amdur gained and lost funding multiple times because her research interfered with the interests of AS&R, which she didn't accommodate into her research. Additionally, she wasn't able to rise above the title of "associate professor" at the different universities where she worked.

For her work and her strength to stick to her own ethical principles, Dr. Mary Amdur became known as the "mother of air pollution toxicology." And in 1961, the United States adopted the Clean Air Act, which "regulates air emissions from stationary and mobile sources," in order to prevent dangerous air pollution events like Donora's. (Summary of the Clean Air Act). 

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Medicine, Health sciences, Biology, Chemistry, Environmental science, History, Politics & law